Lindsay Clancy’s defense lawyer, Kevin Reddington, sharply criticized the prosecution, labeling it as a “repulsive” attack while underscoring how the mental health care system had profoundly failed her client.
“This prosecution has completely devastated this woman’s spirit,” Reddington declared during his closing arguments on August 27 at Clancy’s murder trial. “How does it come to this—how could it possibly?”
Reddington illustrated his point by presenting a touching photograph of Clancy with her children, Cora, aged 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months, alongside a stark image of the crime scene.
“It was the medications—the flawed medical treatment she received,” he asserted, injecting passion into his defense.
Reddington contended that Clancy should not be held criminally liable for the tragic deaths of her children on January 24, 2023. He argued that the excessive prescription of psychiatric drugs led to her suffering from postpartum psychosis. Following the incident, Clancy, in a state of despair, leapt from a second-story window of her home in Duxbury, Massachusetts.
The state, however, argued that Clancy was not psychotic and that she deliberately killed her children.
Clancy does not dispute the killings but has pleaded not guilty. The verdict, anticipated within the coming days, will determine whether she will be sentenced to prison or committed to a psychiatric facility.
“This young lady did nothing wrong in her life,” Reddington told jurors. “She was a nurse, a daughter, a wife, and a darn good mother.”
Reddington then pointed to a Facebook post in which Clancy called Dawson “a prince,” pushing back on the prosecution’s focus on a separate post in which she described him as “the most difficult human I have ever encountered.”
“They would have you thinking she killed him first cruelly because she didn’t like him,” Reddington said. “That is repulsive.”
Reddington also took aim at Clancy’s doctors, including psychiatrist Avram Mack.
Mack testified earlier that the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) defines postpartum depression as depression that begins in the four weeks after giving birth. Reddington, however, has argued that Clancy developed the condition eight months after welcoming Callan.
“It can go up to a year or longer,” Reddington said on Aug. 27. “But we don’t really know…there’s nothing in the DSM—but that’s the Bible.”
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Reddington added, “We’re the most advanced country in the world but we still have doctors that come into court on a murder trial and talk about a four-week cut-off on something that they don’t even know exists.”
In the prosecution’s closing arguments, Second Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague responded to Reddington’s assessment of the mental health care system.
“There’s no dispute that Lindsay Clancy was suffering from mental illness and that she tried to kill herself…that’s not the issue in this trial,” Sprague said. “The issue is whether at the time she killed Cora, Dawson and Callan, she knew the difference between right and wrong and whether she could conform her behavior to the requirements of the law.”
She added, “This case is not about our mental health system or how it treats women or what’s in the DSM-5 and what’s not—that’s a distraction to get you angry and passionate about an important issue, but an issue that’s not on trial here.”
Sprague also pointed to what she called Clancy’s “abundance of care” adding, “This doesn’t mean that she wasn’t struggling, that she wasn’t dealing with mental health issues. She was. She had depression. And whether that’s from bipolar or major depressive disorder or postpartum depression it all boils down to, she was depressed.”
She also disputed that Clancy’s providers were at fault because she didn’t get better, saying, “They were doing the best they could with the information she provided them.”
Earlier in the trial, nurse practitioner Rebecca Jollotta detailed working with Clancy beginning in late November 2022, two months before the killings.
At one point, according to Jollotta’s testimony, Clancy messaged asking if it would be safe to stop taking mirtazapine after five days, reporting that she felt her depression was worsening.
“I know that I can’t stick with taking it,” the prosecution read from Clancy’s messages to Jollotta. “I started having very intrusive thoughts that I never had before.”
However, Jollotta said she told Clancy that those thoughts were “quite common in postpartum depression.”
Still, Clancy replied in another message, “It’s just a very scary, stressful time for me, and starting new meds with side effects is very scary to me.” She later added, “I also feel concerningly numb right now, like I have no emotion. I feel like I’m going to die, and I don’t care. What do I do about this?”
What Happens If Lindsay Clancy Is Found Guilty?
If convicted, Clancy faces life in prison without the possibility of parole. If she is found not guilty due to a lack of criminal responsibility, she would instead be committed to a state mental health facility.